Personal testimony

Judaism, Wntr-Spring, 2004 by Harriet L. Parmet

Survival: The Story of a Sixteen-Year-Old Jewish Boy. By ISRAEL J. ROSENGARTEN. Translated from the Dutch. New York: Syracuse University Press, 1999.

Flare of Memory: Stories of Childhood During the Holocaust. Edited by ANITA BROSTOFF and SHEILA CHAMOVITZ. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

This compelling memoir is the intimate account of one teenager's movements from one camp to another during the Holocaust. Israel J. Rosengarten, a Belgian Jew, was interned in various concentration camps as a 16-year-old for 994 days beginning in 1942 in the Belgian camp of Breendonk, before being liberated by the United States Army on April 11, 1945, from Buchenwald. Rosengarten details the daily simplicity of family life, then the gradual deprivation of life's most innocuous pleasures: attendance at movies, theaters, and public establishments. We are told of his religious education and observance, of his relationship with his brothers, his separation from his parents, the friendships of his childhood and early youth, and his ultimate determined efforts to survive as a slave laborer and incarcerated inmate. The author does not present himself as a historian beyond the personal perception that his experiences provide about the horror of everyday life in the camps. We learn of the maddening and special characteristics of Breendonk, Michelen, Saccrau, Laurahutte, Bismarkhutte, Blechhammer, Blechhammer-Auschwitz III and Grossrosen-most of which were unknown to this reader.

Rosengarten watched helplessly as other prisoners were drowned and hanged, as beautiful and meaningful friendships terminated in death by typhus and other horrendous diseases. Over and over we read of the stench from no toilet facilities, abiding hunger, of living like sardines tightly packed in a tin, and of suicides. Bestial hunger prompted Buchenwald's Russians to engage in cannibalism.

A horrific picture emerges: he had little or no clothing, suffered freezing cold, slept in the ever-present snow, of the constant shadow of death, of being physically as well as psychologically broken from frequent beatings and humiliation. He had to endure standing for hours during unending roll calls, waking up for roll call at 4 A.M., and the endless inspections.

The frightening odors from the crematoria as corpses were incinerated, the death march to Buchenwald, and the dead bodies on the way were a surreal reality for this young boy.

Honest bartering was a condition of staying alive and yet he came to know the heartbreak of deception and swindling by English prisoners. Dysentery, diarrhea, and lice were his constant companions-as were torture and starvation.

Incredible coincidences, miracles, luck, and a fierce will to emerge from this nightmare kept this young risk-taker going. His own physical, mental, and psychological deterioration was mitigated by the joy of liberation, which was coupled with a desolate, broken, desperate loneliness.

That loneliness brought 41 Holocaust survivors together in a series of writing workshops at the Holocaust Center of Pittsburgh to remember and to record critical events of their lives under the Nazis' reign of terror resulting in the memoir Flares of Memory: Stories of Childhood During the Holocaust. These original narratives and poems, ranging from childhood reflections to those of mature adults, succinctly yet graphically depict the human sufferings these Jews endured: starvation, thirst, numbing freezing temperatures, acute fatigue, humiliation, powerlessness, confusion, despondency, and anxiety. Their sorrow and misery over the loss of their parents, children, and extended family is palpable. The text is arranged into ten sections, according to the commonality of events that underlie and unite them, followed by the survivors' responses. (1)

Included are stories of children hidden by strangers, of partisan fighters, of persons posing as Christians, of slave labor and concentration camp inmates, and of resisters inside the camps. In one story, people standing cheek by jowl, freezing and hopeless in a cattle car, are uplifted for a moment by a man's prayer. In another incident, the ordeal of a family's arrival on the transport is made real and almost humorous by the writer's running back to retrieve some nuts. The brutality of SS soldiers is highlighted in yet another recollection-a child's terrified focus on the soldier's spit-polished boots. All of the stories illuminate crucial themes in Holocaust history: German actions intended to destroy all of Jewish life, society and culture, the ruthless efficiency of the German system to achieve the Final Solution, the roles of chance and luck, rescuers and resistance efforts, the joy and accompanying torment of survivors who were liberated, and the ambivalent emotions of survivors as they ponder the Holocaust in its aftermath.

Despite the pain and suffering recounted in Flares of Memory, "hate is not the all abiding message, but rather [that we] learn from the most cruel mistakes of European civilization during the Holocaust so that future generations will not be part of such atrocities" (Yaffa Eliach, xiii).